Dissecting Literotica’s AI Policy

[Dark_Logan_]

In the hiatus of not writing, as for whatever reason my works are not currently getting published, I’ve seen numerous theories here in AH on Lit’s current crisis and the assumption it’s related to a spike in AI driven content/volume.

There’s also the daily well known gripe posts/panic threads relating to “my story was rejected for use of AI”. Which are always contested with claims that no AI has ever been used.

Then there’s the issue on translation for the community who are not English speaking/typing and the complaint that translation tools are flagged as AI content (which they invariably are by necessity)

As in many other daily touch points AI is here and it’s not going away, it’s a threat to genuine writers and their originality. Its threat will only increase so a clear policy on AI is essential

Many around here might have overlooked or be unfamiliar with Lits actual AI policy that’s hidden away in the sites FAQ’s

it’s a wonderfully ambiguous policy that’s worth dissecting… so I gave it a go and added my personal thoughts on the policy that’s being used to reject story’s

**********************

Literotica does not currently have an official comprehensive policy on Artificial Intelligence (AI). We are waiting to see how this technology develops, and getting feedback from our community, before creating any comprehensive AI policy. However, we have put together the following points on where AI fits into Literotica at this time.

Well there’s a great place to start - it’s there in black and white; there is no ‘official comprehensive policy’ on AI usage so we start from a place of massive hypocrisy

1. Literotica is a storytelling community based around the publishing of humanadult fantasies. While AI tools - spellcheck, grammar tools, autocomplete, etc. - have long been used to help Literotica authors write their stories, the fantasies themselves come from the creative efforts, experiences, and fantasies of the real people who make up the Literotica community. As writing tools continue to evolve, we do not foresee a future where machine fantasies will replace the real experiences and creative efforts of Literotica’s community of human authors.

Pick from this what you can but there appears to be an acceptance that AI style tools to check grammar etc have long been used - if that’s the case why penalise those that use them, are we better off with little to no grammar and stories littered with isssues (personal note: as a dyslexic I rely heavily on word to check my spelling and grammar)

2. Literotica explicitly does NOT grant any person or entity (commercial, non-profit, or other) the legal right to train AI on any works published on Literotica. Each work published on Literotica is copyrighted by the author. Before using any work on Literotica for any purpose (including training AI or any other AI-related use) you are required by law to contact the author to request permission to use that work. Using works on Literotica for training AI without legal authorization may subject you and your AI (and any work generated by your AI) to future lawsuits from the original author(s), Literotica, or both.

Fair enough

3. We are monitoring the various ethical concerns around AI tools (some of which we have been contacted about directly from members of the Literotica Community). We plan to continue closely watching the development of AI, along with the development of public policies around AI, before creating our own official policies.

When will this policy be official then and until such time as it is official why are writers being rejected on the basis of AI if there is no official policy on AI?

4. Literotica’s Publishing Guidelines are clear - you must certify that you are the author of AND you own the copyright to any work published on Literotica. While simple AI tools (spelling and grammar tools, for example) do not usually interfere with an author’s copyright, there are unanswered questions around copyright when using some of the latest AI technologies that generate large blocks of text. If there are any questions about copyright related to any work you’ve used AI tools to help you create, we ask that you research and be 100% sure you own the full rights to the work before attempting to publish the work on Literotica. If you publish a work on Literotica to which you do not fully own the copyright, it may open you up to future legal repercussions.

Seems that this is a copyright issue not an AI issue

5. Literotica’s own use of AI is currently limited to improving the way we recommend related works to readers.

????

What is Considered an AI Generated Story at Literotica?

Here we go, this will start to clarify matters, surely

With the proliferation of “smart” writing software and spelling/grammar apps in the last few years, questions arise about whether a story using these tools should be considered AI generated or human written. If blocks of text are being generated by a machine, that’s clearly AI writing. If software helps correct spelling and grammar in text that a human author has written, that’s probably not an AI generated story.

Fair enough on the first point although the ambiguity and contradiction in the lack of a policy is jarring in relation to software that helps correct spelling and grammar

One area of particular concern is software or apps that “rewrite” your paragraphs or stories for you. The text that results from rewriting features is definitely AI generated. These type of apps are replacing original human written text with generic AI generated text, and should be avoided when submitting work to Literotica. Readers prefer to experience your worlds and your fantasies in your own unique voice, rather than having them smoothed into a generic artificial voice available to everyone else using the same software.

Valid point, but in the absence of an official policy how do those who pass judgement justify what’s unique from an author and what’s been generated by an AI. This is surely being based on an assumption that an author doesn’t type the same words/sentence /paragraph/chapter in the same manner as an AI might or could

If you have questions, suggestions, or comments about Artificial Intelligence and how it might impact the future of writing, we recommend that you visit the Literotica Author Support Forum to discuss the issue with other published Literotica Authors.

Yeah OK but without casting too much shade communication is a one way street around here, but let’s leave that complaint where it is for now


********************


And that’s it, that’s the policy (or lack of policy)

Feel free to dissect and interpret as you please and let the comments below descend into the usual AH chaos

If you only take one thing from this post/thread please let it be that as a writer you may fall foul of an AI Policy that is not an ‘official comprehensive policy’

You could conclude, it’s all just being made up as it goes along and is wheeled out as a very convenient broad brush excuse.

 

[TheLobster]

I don’t feel like digging it up right now, but if Literotica is like any other site, somewhere in their terms of service there is surely a bit that says the equivalent of “admins have the sole discretion in deciding what they publish.”

Which means that even absent ‘an official AI policy,’ they are still within their right to reject works based on the presumed use of GenAI. The text you are quoting is basically an informal guideline for how to avoid such rejections, and it doesn’t change the fact that Laurel et al. remain the ultimate arbiters.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I’m used to a corporate environment in a regulated industry. We have policies that are proposed by working groups, approved by official committees, and monitored by designated individuals (plus risk and compliance, and internal audit). When Literotica says ‘policy,’ this is not what they mean.

 

[PennyThompson]

It might be helpful if you provided a direct link to this language, so people can read it for themselves within the context it's written?

 

[EmilyMiller]

It might be helpful if you provided a direct link to this language, so people can read it for themselves within the context it's written?

https://www.literotica.com/faq/publishing/publishing-ai

And it’s kinda precious that Laurel and Manu have outsourced any discussion about the topic to us

 

[MrPixel]

I regard "the policy" - whatever it is - is very, very simple. Don't submit work here generated by or "proofread" and altered by AI tools, be it ChatGPT, Grammarly, MSWord's AI assistant, and the like - in whole or in part. Not even as "idea generators".

Easy. Don't use AI tools for anything you want to publish on Literotica. Steamrollering word soups dissecting the policy certainly won't help your cause.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Don't use AI tools for anything you want to publish on Literotica.

This

 

[AG31]

In the hiatus of not writing, as for whatever reason my works are not currently getting published, I’ve seen numerous theories here in AH on Lit’s current crisis and the assumption it’s related to a spike in AI driven content/volume.

There’s also the daily well known gripe posts/panic threads relating to “my story was rejected for use of AI”. Which are always contested with claims that no AI has ever been used.

Then there’s the issue on translation for the community who are not English speaking/typing and the complaint that translation tools are flagged as AI content (which they invariably are by necessity)

As in many other daily touch points AI is here and it’s not going away, it’s a threat to genuine writers and their originality. Its threat will only increase so a clear policy on AI is essential

Many around here might have overlooked or be unfamiliar with Lits actual AI policy that’s hidden away in the sites FAQ’s

it’s a wonderfully ambiguous policy that’s worth dissecting… so I gave it a go and added my personal thoughts on the policy that’s being used to reject story’s

**********************

Literotica does not currently have an official comprehensive policy on Artificial Intelligence (AI). We are waiting to see how this technology develops, and getting feedback from our community, before creating any comprehensive AI policy. However, we have put together the following points on where AI fits into Literotica at this time.

Well there’s a great place to start - it’s there in black and white; there is no ‘official comprehensive policy’ on AI usage so we start from a place of massive hypocrisy

1. Literotica is a storytelling community based around the publishing of humanadult fantasies. While AI tools - spellcheck, grammar tools, autocomplete, etc. - have long been used to help Literotica authors write their stories, the fantasies themselves come from the creative efforts, experiences, and fantasies of the real people who make up the Literotica community. As writing tools continue to evolve, we do not foresee a future where machine fantasies will replace the real experiences and creative efforts of Literotica’s community of human authors.

Pick from this what you can but there appears to be an acceptance that AI style tools to check grammar etc have long been used - if that’s the case why penalise those that use them, are we better off with little to no grammar and stories littered with isssues (personal note: as a dyslexic I rely heavily on word to check my spelling and grammar)

2. Literotica explicitly does NOT grant any person or entity (commercial, non-profit, or other) the legal right to train AI on any works published on Literotica. Each work published on Literotica is copyrighted by the author. Before using any work on Literotica for any purpose (including training AI or any other AI-related use) you are required by law to contact the author to request permission to use that work. Using works on Literotica for training AI without legal authorization may subject you and your AI (and any work generated by your AI) to future lawsuits from the original author(s), Literotica, or both.

Fair enough

3. We are monitoring the various ethical concerns around AI tools (some of which we have been contacted about directly from members of the Literotica Community). We plan to continue closely watching the development of AI, along with the development of public policies around AI, before creating our own official policies.

When will this policy be official then and until such time as it is official why are writers being rejected on the basis of AI if there is no official policy on AI?

4. Literotica’s Publishing Guidelines are clear - you must certify that you are the author of AND you own the copyright to any work published on Literotica. While simple AI tools (spelling and grammar tools, for example) do not usually interfere with an author’s copyright, there are unanswered questions around copyright when using some of the latest AI technologies that generate large blocks of text. If there are any questions about copyright related to any work you’ve used AI tools to help you create, we ask that you research and be 100% sure you own the full rights to the work before attempting to publish the work on Literotica. If you publish a work on Literotica to which you do not fully own the copyright, it may open you up to future legal repercussions.

Seems that this is a copyright issue not an AI issue

5. Literotica’s own use of AI is currently limited to improving the way we recommend related works to readers.

????

What is Considered an AI Generated Story at Literotica?

Here we go, this will start to clarify matters, surely

With the proliferation of “smart” writing software and spelling/grammar apps in the last few years, questions arise about whether a story using these tools should be considered AI generated or human written. If blocks of text are being generated by a machine, that’s clearly AI writing. If software helps correct spelling and grammar in text that a human author has written, that’s probably not an AI generated story.

Fair enough on the first point although the ambiguity and contradiction in the lack of a policy is jarring in relation to software that helps correct spelling and grammar

One area of particular concern is software or apps that “rewrite” your paragraphs or stories for you. The text that results from rewriting features is definitely AI generated. These type of apps are replacing original human written text with generic AI generated text, and should be avoided when submitting work to Literotica. Readers prefer to experience your worlds and your fantasies in your own unique voice, rather than having them smoothed into a generic artificial voice available to everyone else using the same software.

Valid point, but in the absence of an official policy how do those who pass judgement justify what’s unique from an author and what’s been generated by an AI. This is surely being based on an assumption that an author doesn’t type the same words/sentence /paragraph/chapter in the same manner as an AI might or could

If you have questions, suggestions, or comments about Artificial Intelligence and how it might impact the future of writing, we recommend that you visit the Literotica Author Support Forum to discuss the issue with other published Literotica Authors.

Yeah OK but without casting too much shade communication is a one way street around here, but let’s leave that complaint where it is for now


********************


And that’s it, that’s the policy (or lack of policy)

Feel free to dissect and interpret as you please and let the comments below descend into the usual AH chaos

If you only take one thing from this post/thread please let it be that as a writer you may fall foul of an AI Policy that is not an ‘official comprehensive policy’

You could conclude, it’s all just being made up as it goes along and is wheeled out as a very convenient broad brush excuse.

Thanks for this!

 

[SimonDoom]

In my typically enumerative style, I'll just offer my response:

1. I think it's reasonable that they would want to limit the use of AI in the authorship of stories at Literotica, but not totally. It's reasonable that authors should be able to use basic "AI" tools like spellcheckers and tools like Word's review tools to clean up spelling and grammar and punctuation, and sometimes even change a word choice or two, because that's not effectively any different from having a human editor helping you clean up such things while not materially affecting your claim to have authored your story and to be the legitimate owner of the copyright in your story. But if you use AI in a more significant way to make your prose better, or, more significantly, use it to help you create the plot or stories, it's reasonable to object to that and to want to root that out.

2. How one does this without implementing a policy that creates a rash of false positives and therefore causes stories to be unfairly rejected, I don't know. It's all a big black box to me.

3. It seems reasonable to me that Literotica's owners see this as a moving target, and that they have to be flexible about how they do this, and that they have to maintain a stance of adapting to rapidly changing circumstances, and that they must maintain a significant degree of discretion in how they do that. This is not inherently unfair, and they've made it fairly clear that they claim for themselves the ultimate discretion over the decisions, so we're on notice (although they could make this somewhat clearer).

4. It does not seem reasonable to me that we should expect this site, a mom and pop operation, to maintain the kinds of policies that a large corporation would implement. I've worked in large office settings with more elaborate, spelled-out policies, and I can see how it would be difficult for them to implement a highly structured system to deal with AI.

5. It also seems reasonable to me--but I don't know for sure because they don't communicate much about this--that they might be reticent to say too much about how their policy works, out of concern that a more transparent policy could be more easily gamed. Again, black box: I don't know for sure, but I don't think anybody else here knows either.

6. I don't know, for myself, what more I can reasonably expect them to do. Again, it's a black box, and I think it's that way for all of us. So, I defer judgment, although I share the concern and sense of annoyance when there are long delays and "glitches" that falsely tag stories for being AI-created. This has happened to me, a so-called "popular" author with a history of having few problems getting my stories cleared, and I KNOW that I don't use AI tools to write stories, other than to use Word tools to identify errors in my drafts.

7. Personally, as an author who does not use AI, I appreciate the effort to maintain the integrity of stories and weed out AI-generated stories, even if it means we encounter some additional delay and occasional glitches. I think this benefits the site, benefits readers, and benefits authors who write with a sense of integrity.

7. All that being said, it would be nice if they communicated more often about this issue and what they're doing about it, even if they don't say much of substance. A little communication would go a long way to alleviate the concerns some authors have.

 

[alohadave]

Do we really need another AI thread? What is in this post that hasn't been said a dozen times before?

 

[SamanthaBehgs]

I'd love to see the title of this thread changed to The "I want to talk about AI" thread and kept up with a current topic, like what StillStunned (intentionally not tagged seeing as they clearly don't want to talk about AI) has done. This way we can have all of our AI talk in one place for those who like to hear the various takes on AI and AI policy. And any time it comes up elsewhere, it can be referenced to this thread so that it can be added to the group and discussed by those who want to find it but might otherwise miss it.

​

 

[CalBishForNow]

Well there’s a great place to start - it’s there in black and white; there is no ‘official comprehensive policy’ on AI usage so we start from a place of massive hypocrisy

Yeah, that's a productive, helpful way to start a discussion, all right.

/sarcasm

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Interestingly in light of discussions elsewhere, at no point does it say you can't use translation software because it's AI or anything like that.

There MAY be a risk of Lits software flagging something that was AI TRANSLATED as AI WRITTEN, but that doesn't mean it runs afoul of the rules.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Don't use AI tools for anything you want to publish on Literotica.

Seriously?

If you are not able to distinguish the difference between generative AI and assistive AI, then this approach is certainly what you need.

I have been publishing on Literotica for more than a decade and every one of my stories has benefited from some form of assistive AI, whether it be spell check, grammar check, speech-to-text, or text-to-speech. None of those manipulated my creative efforts into something non-human and nothing has ever been rejected here.

Trying to impose unrealistic fears into people using basic assistive AI tools is misleading at best.

 

[TheLobster]

Y’all saying that a spellcheck is “basic AI” gets me cracking up. It solidifies my opinion that ‘AI’ is the new ‘app’ as far buzzwords as concerned.

Behold, then, my brand new AI:

DICTIONARY = ["aardvark", ..., "zygote"]

def spellcheck(text):
    """Returns misspelt words."""
    return [word for word in text.split() if word not in DICTIONARY]

Surely worth at least $100M of seed funding!

 

[cw5523729]

Interestingly in light of discussions elsewhere, at no point does it say you can't use translation software because it's AI or anything like that.

There MAY be a risk of Lits software flagging something that was AI TRANSLATED as AI WRITTEN, but that doesn't mean it runs afoul of the rules.

Yeah, something that no one seems to mention is that if using AI to translate a story didn't result in the story looking artificial and robotic (or just a cluster fuck of a mess), then the site software would never know in the first place. But since it does....

 

[cw5523729]

Surely worth at least $100M of seed funding!

Do you take Venmo?

 

[MillieDynamite]

Grammarly doesn't rewrite your text; ProWritingAid doesn't unless you ask it to. They do make suggestions for the order of your sentence. How is that considered AI-generated text? It's still your words, they merely change the order, usually moving the opening clause to the closing and closing to the opening clause.

 

[EmilyMiller]

We are at the point where people have no fucking clue what AI is. Let alone GenAI. Let alone LLMs. I blame the broligarchs who are desperate for us to believe their crazy company valuations are justified.

Using spellcheck won’t get your story flagged as AI. Using grammar check won’t either. Getting - say - CoPilot (OpenAI under the covers) to highlight clunky passages, but then fixing them yourself, won’t get your story flagged for AI. Using the text that CoPilot gives you as an alternative might well get you flagged.

Speech to text, or text to speech (I use the latter) won’t get your story flagged for AI.

Using a tool to translate your foreign language story into English may well get you flagged.

 

[SamanthaBehgs]

Using a tool to translate your foreign language story into English may well get you flagged.

I can tell you as a faculty member who has used for pay programs (multiple of them) for flagging potential AI - this definitely gets flagged by nearly all of the ones I've ever used. At least, any that result in any sort of well written document at the end.

That being said, at least as a faculty member, once it was brought to my attention that it was simply a translation issue (and in my cases the students provided me their original work in their native language, allowing me to look at the translations myself) - I allowed them for a grade. Maybe (I'm not the powers that be, I just don't know) Lit does/can/will do the same.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Maybe (I'm not the powers that be, I just don't know) Lit does/can/will do the same.

Literotica has decided otherwise. That’s from Laurel herself, maybe a year ago.

 

[StillStunned]

Yeah, something that no one seems to mention is that if using AI to translate a story didn't result in the story looking artificial and robotic (or just a cluster fuck of a mess), then the site software would never know in the first place. But since it does....

I've been dealing with machine-translated (and in recent years AI-translated) texts since 1999. All that time, the companies have been throwing millions into their marketing, saying "We're nearly there, it's almost as good as human translation!" And surprise! it never is, at least not beyond a superficial glance.

 

[PennyThompson]

Grammarly doesn't rewrite your text

This part is tricky and I think it often gets people into trouble here. Because grammarly CAN just be used like a smarter spellchecker, but it also has generative functions where it will offer to rewrite your text to be more concise, more casual, more professional, etc.

 

[MillieDynamite]

But often, well-written passages get flagged as AI.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I don't use it that way, and I never allow it to change the order of my words; I do that myself if I like what it says. It often places the person's name or pronoun at the beginning of the sentence, which is considered bad writing if it exceeds the industry average, and it does if AI is involved.

This part is tricky and I think it often gets people into trouble here. Because grammarly CAN just be used like a smarter spellchecker, but it also has generative functions where it will offer to rewrite your text to be more concise, more casual, more professional, etc.